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Britain’s Daily Mail Web Site Makes Foray Into America

May 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In recent days, one of the most comprehensive destinations for gossip about the Cleveland kidnapping victims was not an American news outlet. It was Mail Online, the Web site of the British tabloid The Daily Mail, which has taken a distinctly gossipy approach to all news.

The kidnappings seem ready-made for the Mail Online’s tabloid formula, which has made it the third-most-visited newspaper site in the world. It attracted 46.4 million unique visitors in March, including 17.2 million visitors from the United States, according to comScore, drawn by a home page filled with stories about moose attacks, plastic surgery mishaps and celebrities’ hairstyles and weight changes posted down the right side in the popular “sidebar of shame.”

“They are certainly a site to be watched,” said Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of Cosmopolitan and US Weekly who now edits the gossip Web site HollywoodLife.com. “They really cover the waterfront of celebrities.”

Like other British newspaper sites, including the more traditional Guardian, Mail Online is making an even greater assault on American shores. In early 2011, The Daily Mail started covering celebrities in Los Angeles. A year later, it expanded to New York by opening an office in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, filling offices with mainly British journalists paid from $40,000 to $60,000, according to a person who has worked alongside the British reporters in New York.

It is now an 80-person operation in the United States, according to George Simpson, a spokesman for the company, and reports on American stories with relish.  Its coverage of the Cleveland kidnappings has focused on details like the “happy abduction day” cakes that the man charged in the case is said to have given each victim on the anniversary of her capture, and floor plans of his house.

Along with its characteristic aggressiveness and populism, Mail Online also brings some bare-knuckle tabloid habits that have angered some competitors in American media. The Daily News and The New York Times have accused Mail Online of lifting stories without attribution. A photo agency in Florida that sells celebrity photographs taken in Los Angeles sued the company, claiming it reprinted photographs without permission.

Some analysts who are generally positive about Mail Online’s growth are concerned about its journalism practices.

“They’re going to have to acquire fairly rapidly sources of content that are proper,” said David Reynolds, an equity analyst at Jefferies.

Mr. Simpson said that Mail Online was just trying to compete with other digital publishers like The Huffington Post “for whom aggregation is a way of life” and that “Mail Online has had to adapt to this new way of news gathering.” Mr. Simpson said that during fast-paced news stories, it can be difficult to determine who is the rightful copyright holder. But “we endeavor to pay the rightful copyright holder speedily and fairly.”

The bigger question facing Mail Online remains whether, like many other popular sites, it can attract the kind of revenue it needs to sustain its American operation. Will advertisers want to be placed next to articles with headlines like “Evil Monster Grandma” or “Man who thought he just had a runny nose for a year and a half finds out it was really his brain fluid leaking”? According to Mr. Reynolds, the American version of the Daily Mail Web site, with its own ads and mix of content, generates only about $7.2 million in annual revenue.

For now, many analysts consider the Mail Online a growth source for a strait-laced media company. The parent company’s total annual revenue is about $2.7 billion and its net income is $466 million. It depends on newspapers for about 20 percent of its profits, according to Mr. Reynolds.

Alex DeGroote, a media analyst with Panmure, Gordon Company, said that while Mail Online was still not profitable, its growth had helped its broader company’s stock price grow roughly 80 percent in the last year.

“I would argue that the main driver for that is the recognition of these online assets,” Mr. DeGroote said. “Think of Mail Online as a young, relatively immature asset that has continued to outperform any expectations.”

Mr. Simpson stressed that it’s early days for Mail Online in the United States.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/business/media/britains-daily-mail-web-site-makes-foray-into-america.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Fandango Movie Ticket Service Introduces Site Aimed at Hispanics

February 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Hispanics buy a quarter of all movie tickets sold in the United States. But do they need their own place to buy them?

Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo. Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo.

On Monday, NBCUniversal will find out. The media company’s movie ticket service, Fandango, in partnership with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo, will introduce Fandango Cine, a digital movie ticket service aimed at Latinos. The Web site and related app will operate separately from Fandango and will highlight movies, actors and original video clips meant to resonate with Hispanics.

The collaboration comes as box-office data points to Hispanics as a major moviegoing force, even as the industry over all has struggled. Hispanic moviegoers bought 286 million movie tickets in 2011, and they go to an average of seven movies a year, compared with five a year for non-Hispanics, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

At the same time, Hispanics are 68 percent more likely than non-Hispanics to watch video on the Internet, according to Nielsen. Fandango had an average of 41 million unique visitors a month in 2012, a record for the service, which charges users a fee to buy movie tickets in advance.

“We recognized from the data that there’s a unique audience in Hispanics in their affinity for moviegoing and mobile technology,” said Paul Yanover, president of Fandango. “That’s a pretty important audience segment we thought we could better service.”

In addition to movie ticket sales, Fandango Cine will include a feature highlighting Hispanic actors and directors under the heading “Overlooked by Oscar.” A segment called “Cine Buzz” will provide celebrity scoops on Latinos in Hollywood.

The Spanish-language Web site will also highlight movies — like “Snitch,” starring Benjamin Bratt as a Mexican drug lord, and “Bless Me, Ultima,” based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya — that won’t get prominent play on English-language Fandango but are expected to attract heavily Hispanic audiences.

Ever since Comcast took control of NBCUniversal two years ago, the media conglomerate has encouraged partnerships among its previously disparate divisions. Telemundo will provide video clips to Fandango Cine, which will prominently promote Universal Pictures’s “Fast Furious 6.” A Spanish-speaking Fandango Cine movie critic will have a regular segment on Telemundo’s morning show “Un Nuevo Día.”

The partnership grew in part out of Telemundo’s inroads with Hollywood studios. For years, the network received quizzical glances from movie executives who were asked to advertise their English-language films during Telemundo’s lineup of Spanish-language sports, telenovelas and talk shows.

“Today, every single movie is Hispanic focused,” said Peter E. Blacker, executive vice president for digital and emerging media at Telemundo. “That’s a big change from when I used to go around to studios and they didn’t understand the potential.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/25/2013, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Fandango Adds Service Aimed at Hispanics.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/fandango-adds-service-aimed-at-hispanics/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Hulu’s Chief Is Leaving, Raising Questions About Its Future

January 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

8:39 p.m. | Updated
Jason Kilar, the Web wizard who turned Hulu from a punch line into a popular source of online video, said on Friday that he would step down as the site’s founding chief executive in the next three months.

The announcement is certain to turn up the volume on something that’s a constant hum in the media industry: speculation about the future of Hulu — and if it has one at all. Its owners, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast and the News Corporation, also run the ABC, Fox and NBC networks, and they do not agree about what to do with the Web site. Perversely, the more popular Hulu becomes, the more of a problem it is for the owners, since it may be taking viewers and advertising dollars away from their core television businesses.

Mr. Kilar never saw it that way, however. He was Hulu’s best advocate, sometimes clashing with the network executives on Hulu’s board and arguing that they had to keep investing in the site, since television’s future will surely involve Internet distribution.

For many Americans, that future is already here: Hulu’s streams of TV shows attract 30 million unique visitors a month via computers and untold millions more via tablets and Internet-connected television sets. Three million pay for Hulu Plus, its subscription arm — not bad for a start-up once ridiculed as “ClownCo.”

Mr. Kilar declined an interview request on Friday. In an e-mail message to employees, he gave no indication why he was moving on or what he might do next. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made,” he said.

He said his departure would take effect within the first quarter of the year. No successor was named.

Mr. Kilar, a former executive at Amazon, has in the past been mentioned for a number of prominent jobs in Silicon Valley. He was a top candidate last year for the chief executive position at Yahoo, but Hulu said he declined to be considered. The job later went to Marissa Mayer, a longtime Google employee.

His departure comes just several months after the only independent owner of Hulu, Providence Equity Partners, sold its 10 percent stake, originally bought for $100 million, for $200 million. Mr. Kilar and other employees also sold their stakes in the company at that time, netting Mr. Kilar about $40 million, according to an executive with knowledge of the transaction.

On Friday, there was widespread praise for Mr. Kilar for steering Hulu through sometimes turbulent seas. “He defied enormous odds, built from scratch one of the top five digital video brands, created two viable and growing businesses (free and pay) and got his well-deserved payday — not bad for five years’ work,” J. B. Perrette, who used to help oversee NBC’s investment in Hulu and now runs Discovery Communication’s digital operations, said in an e-mail.

That said, Mr. Kilar’s announcement did not entirely surprise many in the industry. During his tenure, he sometimes clashed with the owners on Hulu, exemplifying the divide between new, disruptive modes of distribution like the Internet and the more traditional operations at major media companies. As the parent companies pulled back on the amount of ABC, Fox and NBC programming provided to Hulu, the Web site invested in original content to fill the gaps and attract attention. That investment effort continues, led by one of Mr. Kilar’s deputies, Andy Forssell, but many in the industry say they believe that Hulu’s future remains fuzzy.

An internal memo obtained by Variety in August showed that the owners may want to change their agreements with Hulu so that it is no longer the exclusive distributor of repeats of television shows like “The Office” and “Family Guy.” That way, the owners could also sell repeat rights to online video services like YouTube, Netflix or Amazon.

Some of the owners also wanted more advertisements on the site, which had revenue of about $700 million last year but is not yet believed to be profitable. Much of the revenue came from Hulu Plus, and therein lies another fault line: the owners may concentrate on the paid part to the detriment of the free streaming part.

The owners had no comment about any of that on Friday, though. Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called Mr. Kilar an integral part of the Hulu story and said in a statement, “We are proud of his achievements, we appreciate what he’s built, and we share his confidence in his team’s ability to drive Hulu forward from here.”

Rich Tom, the site’s chief technology officer, will also depart in the first quarter.

This month, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, predicted that News Corporation would seek to acquire its competitors’ stakes in Hulu in 2013. Comcast, he said, has no managerial control of Hulu and Disney “appears increasingly less interested” in the site.

In August, News Corporation said that Jonathan Miller, the company’s chief digital officer since 2009 and a vocal champion of Hulu, would leave the company. Mr. Miller represented News Corporation on the Hulu board and had helped the media company broker a stake in Roku. News Corporation has had some high-stakes stumbles in technology with both Myspace and its tablet-only publication, The Daily, which has led some analysts to expect the company to tread cautiously with future digital investments like Hulu. And Chase Carey, the No. 2 to the chief executive of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is said to be less enamored with the service.

Mr. Murdoch, however, praised Mr. Kilar for “building Hulu into one of the leading online video services available today.” He added, “It’s incredibly well positioned for the road ahead.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/jason-kilar-head-of-hulu-is-moving-on/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Advertising: Coke Revamps Web Site to Tell Its Story

November 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The company is, of course, Coca-Cola, which plans on Monday to give its site a makeover that executives describe as the most ambitious digital project they have undertaken. To underline the intent to re-present the corporate Web site as an online magazine, it will be called Coca-Cola Journey, after a magazine named Journey that was published for the company’s employees from 1987 to 1997.

The reorganized Web site will offer articles on subjects like entertainment, the environment, health and sports, including longer pieces given prominence in the same way that magazines play up cover pieces. Interviews, opinion columns, video and audio clips, photo galleries and blogs also will be featured.

The main business-oriented content of the Web site — material like biographies of executives, investor information, job postings and news releases — will remain after the revamping.

The Web site draws about 1.2 million unique visitors a month, executives said, a figure they hope will grow substantially with the more consumer-focused philosophy. When the site went live in 1995, it represented the first Internet venture for the Coca-Cola Company. A Web site devoted to the Coca-Cola brand followed, with an extensive presence for the company and its brands in social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

The last time the corporate Web site was redesigned was in 2005, “a lifetime in technology,” said Ashley Brown, director for digital communications and social media at the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. “We wondered, ‘Was it really working as hard for us as it could?’ ”

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The journey to introducing Coca-Cola Journey began about a year ago when Muhtar A. Kent, chairman and chief executive, “challenged us to find a way to bring back Journey in the digital age,” Mr. Brown said. “And we thought, ‘Why should our great Coke story stay internal?’ ”

The use of the word “story” is significant because the Web site changes are indicative of the growing interest among marketers in recasting their communications with consumers as storytelling rather than advertising. Just as attention is being paid to developing content to use for brand storytelling, an appetite also exists for corporate storytelling.

“The hot thing is to talk about being publishers,” Mr. Brown said. “We have this belief in great, real content and creating content that can be spread through any medium as part of our ‘liquid and linked’ strategy.”

To make that easier, “my team, the digital communications and social media team, has been re-formed in the last year to look more like an editorial team at a long-lead magazine,” he added, “with a production schedule and an editorial calendar.”

Four full-time employees are devoted to the corporate Web site, Mr. Brown said. And content is also being created by 40 freelance writers and photographers as well as “people throughout the Coke system, in marketing and public relations.”

“We are acting as newshounds in the organization,” he added. “It’s very much like at a newspaper or a magazine.”

A notable difference distinguishes Coca-Cola Journey from most of those media, apart from custom publications or house organs: The storytelling on the Web site will be subjective, not objective, material that is favorable to the brands, products and interests of the Coca-Cola Company.

Although the content comes “with a point of view,” Mr. Brown acknowledged, “we want to be a credible source.”

For instance, plans call for accepting opinion columns that are at variance with the views of the company, with explanations at the top that “would say, ‘Coca-Cola has a different perspective’ and there’d be space for us to write a counterpoint,” he said.

Asked if the corporate Web site would accept an opinion column by, say, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, advocating restrictions on the sale of large sugary drinks, Mr. Brown replied: “Anything’s possible. If you want to mention that to Mayor Bloomberg, I would give you my e-mail. We have a belief here that not shying away from tough decisions is a good thing and gives us credibility.”

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“I’m sure we’re going to make mistakes,” he said, “and readers are going to tell us.”

Mr. Brown likened the approach that will guide him in producing the Web site to the company’s practices in social media.

“On Facebook, on Twitter, you can leave a comment, ‘I am a Pepsi drinker,’ and that will stay on the site forever, or until it gets archived,” he said.

The Coca-Cola Company will promote the new version of the corporate Web site with search engine marketing on Google, advertisements on LinkedIn and outreach to the “hundreds of thousands of associates — customers, partners — we have around the world,” Mr. Brown said.

As for the costs involved, he described them as “a multimillion-dollar effort over multiyears.”

Asked to be more specific, he replied, “Multi every year of the multiyears.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/media/coke-revamps-web-site-to-tell-its-story.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to Find Its Way

September 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

That became painfully clear Tuesday when Yahoo’s board abruptly fired its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz. She focused on bolstering Yahoo’s online media and original reporting, but neglected to develop the new social networking tools, video services or mobile apps that people now prefer to use. In that way, the tale of Yahoo’s misfortunes is not just one of management woes, but a vivid illustration of the transition from Web sites that publish professional content to a new digital world dominated by mobile phones and sites where the users are the content creators.

Yahoo’s problems are shared with another Internet pioneer, AOL. Both astutely capitalized on the first huge shift in how people read — moving online from paper — but they failed to follow Internet users and advertisers to cellphone screens and social networks. Both companies have tried to become media companies. Meanwhile, the next generation of companies, like Google and Facebook, have happily satisfied the demand for information and entertainment — not by creating content but by building mobile and social networking services that attract users and, increasingly, valuable advertisers.

“Yahoo hangs on to the pieces that made it a giant years ago,” said Shar VanBoskirk, a digital marketing analyst at Forrester Research. “It assumes people will come to its Web site, and what users are looking for now is a much more syndicated experience that allows them to go to mobile devices and co-create content.”

As the way people use the Internet changed, she said, Yahoo and AOL “hit the wall and didn’t continue to evolve as the rest of the market did.” Yahoo’s sites, like its home page, e-mail service and sites for finance and entertainment, still have a huge audience — 177.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore — second only to Google’s but more than Facebook’s. But while Yahoo’s traffic has flattened, both Google and Facebook are growing in popularity. And people spend about half as much time on Yahoo as they do on Facebook.

Advertisers are chasing what they say is more profitable prey — users of smartphones, video sites and social networks, and the companies that cater to them. Yahoo has always led in one of the most important corners of the advertising marketing: display ads, those that show images and video. But Facebook and Google are closing in on Yahoo, in large part because they can offer advertisers more personal information about users.

Yahoo’s slice of the display advertising pie has shrunk for three years in a row, according to eMarketer, a digital-marketing research firm. Last year, its share of display ads was 14.4 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for Facebook and 8.6 percent for Google. But this year, Facebook will surge ahead of Yahoo with 17.7 percent to Yahoo’s 13.6 percent, eMarketer predicts. And by next year, Google will have nearly caught up to Yahoo, too, with 12.3 percent of display ads compared with 12.5 percent at Yahoo and 19.4 percent at Facebook.

“Yahoo still has an enormous amount of traffic,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “But more and more ad buys are being made in a more targeted way.” Advertisers are attracted to information that Facebook has about a user’s friends or Google has about a user’s search queries, he said.

Mr. Hallerman compared Yahoo and its audience to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1960s, like Life and Look. Those publications were done in by the shift among advertisers to magazines aimed at specific groups like celebrity news or golf. “The idea of a portal trying to be everything to everybody is outdated,” he said.

Advertising executives also criticized Yahoo for the shortcomings of its advertising technology as well as executive turnover that meant that every few months, ad agencies had to teach a new Yahoo executive about their accounts. “When you look at Yahoo, there’s a lot of distractions,” said Christian Juhl, president of the Western region at Razorfish, a digital ad agency owned by the Publicis Groupe.

Stuart Elliott contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/technology/once-a-leader-yahoo-now-struggles-to-find-its-way.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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